The instant specification relates to digital information retrieval in the context of discovery in a social media platform.
A social media messaging platform may facilitate the exchange of millions or hundreds of millions of social media messages among its users. The messages exchanged on the platform often can provide users of the platform the latest update or reporting on current events in the user's timeline (i.e., a chronological stream of messages from users associated with or linked to the user or promoted by the social media messaging platform). Also, some users may use a social media messaging platform to provide information that targets existing and potential contacts. Such users may not necessarily focus on consuming content on the timeline, but rather on broadcasting content to contacts and potential contacts.
Growing a social media presence for a user on a social media messaging platform can be relatively challenging, especially when the user seeking to discover and acquire contacts or followers previously unknown to the user, but who would regardless be valuable or otherwise interesting to the user. In one example, when an entity initially creates an account on the messaging platform and has zero followers, propagation of a message according to only to the entity's follow graph will not result in the message being distributed. In some instances, the entity has professional or business reasons in seeking to engage with others with whom the entity has yet to be acquainted. Besides acquiring new followers, the entity may wish to communicate a message beyond their current set of followers (e.g., inform potential customers and generate public awareness of a new product or service) in a manner that targets the most relevant potential customers. However, implementing campaign strategies for content promotion on existing social media platforms may be ineffective, labor and time intensive, and may lack the technical framework to programmatically amplify content distribution to other users of the platform in an efficient manner.